skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you buy a share of GME from Citadel Securities, that may typically result in an immediate unhedged short position at Citadel, if they weren't already holding it.

Normally, a market maker might then close it by buying a share from someone trying to sell. But in a massively one-way market like GME, it's quite likely that they build up a large enough unhedged massive short position that they say "no, we're not taking on any more risk" and communicate that to Robin Hood.
Are these users trading on margin?
Except it is still ok to sell these stocks...ok bro...
Citadel invested in Melvin this week at a steep discount, they do not own the majority of Melvin (at least that hasn’t been publicly announced).

Melvin announced they had cleared their position in GME days ago so is unlikely to be the driver for brokerage behavior today.

Citadel does not buy user data from Robinhood, they are one of Robinhood internalizers. They pay for the privilege of either trading against Robinhood based orders or routing them to an exchange.

Not allowing buys can happen for a wide variety of reasons from technical, business to legal to counterparty demands and isn’t necessarily signs of collusion.

That said there is certainly the appearance of a conflict of interest and I’m sure Robinhood will be addressing that in court and to investigators presently.
This is what's pissing me off. I had a tiny "fuck it" position on BB with a stop-loss that kicked in. Now I can't get back in at the lower price and the one way ban is likely why the stock fell under my sell price.

No warning from Robinhood on the current issue either or I would have pulled my sell order.
Wow if true, this is a huge violation of user trust
> due to the unreasonable risk involved in brokering your position, we have closed your X shares of GME for an average price of Y

What in the world??

"In order to protect you from yourself, we have taken away your free will. Thanks!"
Browing the top of reddit right now is really reminiscent of /r/The_Donald, particularly the shift from a bunch of 'ironic' jokers to conspiracy theories and shouty chest beating and calls for upvotes.

I'd treat anything like this with a huge pinch of salt.
My point is that if AAPL had shot up to $15/share when Jobs came back, and people bought in then at $15 and held, they'd currently have a YoY gain of 10%
I mean, doing something that will have a significant effect on markets is manipulation, which is regulated by the sec. It does apply, but it won't change. The only way to prevent this is removing the intermediaries, which events like this are pushing people towards.
In the modern world the right to waste money is held to be very sacred - I have always viewed casinos as a great money -> fun conversion machine for those who can sensibly enjoy it... but for those who can't there isn't anyone stopping them at the door and saying "We already have 90% of your money, why don't you go home and enjoy a quiet evening of netflix".

The stock market has a long reputation of saying "Well, sucks to be you" when various scams are committed - even when a hedge fund manager burns through a bunch of retirement funds and then shows up at the company demanding their annual retainer so I am quite reluctant to buy that this one instance is when altruism is coming in to play.

A bunch of people are choosing to loose a bit of their money in exchange for warm fuzzy feelings - I think it's absolutely idiotic but then again I don't tend to patronize casinos either. If there is someone behind this running a pump & dump scam they absolutely should be prosecuted as normal, but falling victim to a financial scam on the stock market is one of those properties capitalist libertarians always hold up and they can't change their mind just because this one instance ended up screwing them over instead.
this is despicable.
Yep. I’ll repeat what I said in another thread:

It’s really kind of ironic. People are knee-jerk blaming RH for closing margin positions because they didn’t fully understand how they work and the risks involved. Simultaneously, the same people are blaming RH for stepping in the way of what very certainly would have turned into a bad trade for a lot of people.

I don’t take RH’s side but it’s hard to see a winning play for them, it’s damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t.
I don't see any links to high res photos. Are they available?
I saw this on Twitter and couldn't find any sources to confirm that the e-mail screenshot is real. Take this with a pinch of salt, it might be fake.
I'm with you on this. It's shameful that Congress and State Legislatures have abdicated power to executive functionaries indefinitely. We're closing in on D-Day+1 year and our deliberative bodies have yet to deliberate our public health policies (although Congress has proven they can stimulate demand for consumer goods, from time to time).
People started losing money, LOTS of money. Phone calls were made and they reached the decision to shut down trading everywhere they could.

We'll see how it worked in the coming weeks.
There are 67.5m GME shares outstanding. So yeah, 300m+ people competing to own single share would drive GME up.
Allowing a stock to become sell only will trigger a sell off and this WILL help the short sellers cover ( may be with reduced loss)..

Just allowing selling of a stock makes, free markets a joke.

I am seeing analogies like will apple store sell me a pixel 3a etc. This is not a product robinhood buys or sells , they make my transaction with a bigger shark (Citadel) who is in bed with the hedge fund who shorted ~112% of outstanding shares. When a group of people took advantage and created a squeeze, they block their ability to buy more to strengthen their squeeze.
"Just got a tip" has about as much clout as "I'm making this up"
I agree. Wall street is desperate but they are not that desperate. Don’t do crazy things on margin.
america categorically has the strongest free speech laws in the world, and anyone who would throw away their birthright out of fear is a worm
Is this the prelude to https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchfor...?
If their market makers are preventing people from selling a stock surely they must prevent customers from selling stocks, right? But you can freely sell the stock.
TD Canada has prevented some forms of orders (e.g. market buy), but not limit buy - I think this isn't so bad as their clients might expect the quoted price and get screwed at open because of volatility
He was margin called. This is literally how margin works, has nothing to do with GME or the Robinhood furor.
That’s main goal. But what is long term goal of the position. After short sellers go bust. What are people going to do with their positions?
you are using their brokerage. their rules. free will has nothing to do with it.
It’s also not a clear conclusion even remotely at all. There’s nothing remotely illegal about retail investors coordinating together to profit from a short squeeze opportunity.
Robinhood's behavior here is wicked and wrong. Yes, Robinhood's EULA technically allows them to do this wicked thing. The same EULA says that Robinhood can't be sued over it or anything else.

It's about time we talk about how it's not in the public's interest to allow companies to put arbitrarily user-hostile terms in their user agreements.
It is in their T&Cs that they can do this if your account is trading on margin. If not, then it feels like there's a potential for a class action lawsuit.
From my perspective, you just flipped the purpose of 1A.

Right now you have the right to associate or disassociate with whomever you like (protected classes aside).
In your altered future, the government forces churches to allow atheists and rival religions to be allowed to speak at the church, despite the desires of the owners and congregation. It would effectively be compelled association.
It was a strong anti trump sentiment that united the democrats but it’s easy to forget that Biden is still met with some caution in his own party as being the establishment candidate, not necessarily a corporate stooge but no Bernie either, it would do more to dispel that within his own party.
from robinhood? are you kidding, or what?
For anyone saying, "Most likely trading on margin"

Remember:

This morning Robinhood conspired with Citadel to halt trading amid a short ladder sell to drive the price lower, allowing shorts to cover their losses with no competition.

This is blatant market manipulation and anti competitive behavior, and must be stopped.

Why does everyone insist on protecting billionaires who insist on playing the game with a different set of rules than the rest of us?
Three points:

1) No optimization, no problem. Plain static HTML needs nothing more than maybe some basic caching. Apache hardly even knows it's there.

2) Why is this such a lost art? Why do we tell people to go learn full stack development when HTML can do the job quite well? Are we trying to compensate poor marketing skills by adding whiz bang buzzword bingo technologies?

3) If you are now hungry for Tamales, and I know you are, Costco (in the US) has great tamales in the refrigerated section near the pastas and sausages. They are muy bueno :)
Yes, that is how it works when you buy stock on margin and do not have the cash to cover. When the price dips, the risk increases to the broker, and so they may liquidate your position to cover.
This is ONLY if you enable margin trading via Robinhood Gold - they increased their margin requirements recently on GME and this will not happen to you if you are trading on cash.
This feels like RH is going to go under if they don’t make this move? Are they holding a lot of risk by not doing this or something?

And what repercussions would they face, surely they’ve flagged that risk and are doing it anyway.
Melvin capital is a market maker, it's in the list at least... You might check yourself before acting so high and mighty. 1 is the reference for wikipedia. 2 is just another source in case you doubt. By the way, Citadel is also on that list. Retail did do something to Citadel and Melvin... so wrong on both counts.

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20070228050751/http://www.alphat...

2. https://www.level2stockquotes.com/market-makers-m-list.html
Thomas Costello has found countering data: https://psyarxiv.com/3nprq, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00926...

This sums it up pretty well: "Left-wing authoritarians, in Costello's research, typically strongly agree with the following statements: the rich should be stripped of their belongs and status; deep-down just about all conservatives are racist, sexist and homophobic; classrooms can be safe spaces that protect students from the discussion of harmful ideas." (https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/05/there-suc...)

All of which lines up with the rhetoric from the Bolsheviks and the Maoists and a lot of the modern day critical race theorists.
In practice you would never have 100% be 0 stars if there was any significant number of ratings.
When it says “top leaderboard,” over what timeframe is this calculated? Does the list update based on comments from the last 24 hours, for example?
Forcibly closing under-margined securities positions is totally normal. In a cash account, it would certainly be suspect.

Preventing opening buys hurts everyone who is long -- including a large number of Robinhood customers -- by barring trades that would provide liquidity to sellers and thus dampen the sellers' stock impact. So essentially, Robinhood chose a course of action that disproportionately imposes losses upon its own customers.

The concept of price impact is part of the reason that stock buybacks are able to "return capital" to investors. Demand from buyers pushes prices upward.

No idea if that is a central argument of the case.
Just b/c someone internally may have brought it up doesn't mean it shouldn't be brought up externally. It also doesn't mean the powers that be internally aren't doing a "can we get away with this" simply because it is cool, it does generate buzz, etc.
> I really hope that gambling on GME is not a "major part" of a significant number of people's lives.

It's a major part of the mega wealthy's lives. They've profited in this pandemic and it's not because of the fundamentals. Shorts squeeze the market too much but they ( hedge funds) should be responsible adults and take their losses. Not force Robinhood to unethically force sell it's massive user base to liquidate b/c their system bit their biggest customer.

We're about to see whether the people actually have rights or if this is actually a class warfare situation. I suspect it's the latter.
There were nationwide protests against the election result in 2016. They blocked the highways here in california. People also disrupted confirmation hearings back then.
That was my thought process as well, but no where in the app message or email does it say the position was closed out due to a margin call.
Yes, that's the big question here. If it's a margin trade, the broker is also a lender and has some discretion. If it's a cash trade, the broker has no risk and should not interfere. Does anyone know? This matters.
They didn't. It was TD, Interactive Brokers, and Robinhood. Maybe more by now, but they acted alone.

My guess is that market makers that these brokers sell orders to said no. Brokers make a lot of money selling retail orders to someone else.
Will repeat what I said above:

This morning Robinhood conspired with Citadel to halt trading amid a short ladder sell to drive the price lower, allowing shorts to cover their losses with no competition.

This is blatant market manipulation and anti competitive behavior, and must be stopped.

Why does everyone insist on protecting billionaires who insist on playing the game with a different set of rules than the rest of us?
They blocked the opening of new positions. You can still buy if it results in a short position being closed. Pretty typical move, almost certainly done to protect themselves from scrutiny by the SEC and CFPB.
Where does tat say "to protect you from yourself"? Reads to me a lot more as "since brokering your position is an unreasonable risk to us, we stop doing so" (and the right to do so is likely lined out in their ToS)
Agreed, almost certainly the case.

However, they should have inserted some notice in the UI that this was a result of a margin call that couldn't be met, given the level of knowledge of many of their users.
We Develop AI for 510(k)-Cleared Devices
Market manipulation is still manipulation whether you've written it in your Terms of Service (which isn't the law btw like Craigslist do-not-scrape "law"). The basic spirit of the contract between a trade executor and the client does not allow for interference barring regulatory or SEC enforcement.

Meaning RH took it on themselves to enforce a rule that its users had no idea of, hence the outrage.

If it was well known (with clear warnings on the splash screen of RH highlighting their "special" rule) then the case might be different.

If it gets rejected at this level then almost certainly SEC will be involved. If they side with RH then it would certainly destroy the trust of the retail trading industry. We also now seem to be witnessing a political opportunity for the Biden administration (ex. AOC's tweet throwing support for WSB).

Essentially what we are seeing is a payback by the people who got outsmarted by a bunch of redditors and arguing that they cannot be allowed to fail for their own stupid trades (like shorting over 100% of the stock available), so they pulled all the tricks in the book to once again bend the market to their will like they always have.

Anybody who thinks things will go as they have before are mistaken; We are in a very different political environment and stuff like this is the perfect opportunity for the Biden administration.
it similar to how hacker news penalizes submission that rally for upvotes (specifically I remember a discussion about how posting links of your submission to twitter can penalize it)
Yeah. I guess this is the eb and flow of life. I sort of wish we could ban twitter submissions. I've only seen one that's useful in my many years of lurking.

Cest la vie.
Should we shut down casinos, as well, then? How about state operated lotteries, are those still okay?

I genuinely do not understand this "won't someone, please, think of the children?!" line of reasoning. This isn't the first short squeeze in history that led to retail winners and losers. Retail investors had a hand in the dotcom crash and the 1929 crash.

Why is it only applicable to this specific short squeeze?
It's not possible for someone like me to purchase a publicly traded security without going through a broker. So what you're saying is that market participants can only participate if they do what the people making the market want?
more of these posts please 10/10
In fact there are a number of stocks that robinhood doesn't list, namely CEFs and others
From my perspective, which admittedly is subjective and might be missing glaring examples to the opposite, open source has increasingly become a free marketing gimmick for startups looking to be bought out. I feel like this would explain why so many open source projects these day seem surprised when confronted with the expectations of being an open source project.

All things being equal, a piece of software will become more popular if it's open source. If it's open source and worse than the proprietary alternative, it will still pick up steam, while a proprietary competitor would be largely ignored. In fact, I would claim that a proprietary competitor will even be ignored if it's just as good, and even if it's a bit better: because there is a cost of adoption of new technologies, being a bit better isn't enough.

An example of something that wasn't open source but succeeded anyway is Splunk. As far as I know, they have never leveraged open source, but their selling point was so unique that they didn't need to. However, most ideas aren't that game changing. Most projects don't have the luxury of an idea that has an elevator pitch so attractive it will attract both investors and customers right away.

By 2007, Splunk had raised US$ 40M. The initial release of Elasticsearch was in 2010. How would ES have been received if they went to market with a proprietary product? I think the reason why it was open sourced from the start is quite obvious: noone would have cared otherwise, or they would have been overshadowed by an open source alternative. There was a demand for new, flashy, modern log monitoring among those that didn't want to buy Splunk, so it didn't have to be as good.

What seems to happen more frequently though is that cloud services pick up these open source alternatives, make money off them, and/or buy up the company holding the IP. They move in and "embrace, extend and extinguish", killing two birds with one stone: on the one hand they damage the primary free alternative, while at the same time improving it while owning the full rights to the improvements.

I don't have an answer to what to "do" about this but it seems like an increasing trend ever since the cloud industry started swallowing up most of what IT is about. In a way I suppose it's unavoidable, and maybe we need to see the beauty in the inherent resilience of open source: even when it's bought off and killed, they can never kill the previously freely licensed code. The "idea" if you will can live on, and must live on if we're going to avoid a complete dystopia in the long run. So turn the frustration of your favorite project being killed off into action: realize that no code comes for free, behind every open source success is usually an unsung and unpaid hero, and if you can't pick up the torch yourself, at least throw a few bucks to those who do. What else is there?
Not if you ask one of your buddies at CNBC to announce it, and when caught they just say oops my bad, it was based on incorrect info.
For pointers to other vertices of this story graph, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25933543.
I'm very much with the WSB folks, but I have a theory about the trading halt that may be more innocent. RH's exposure to margin ensures that when GME inevitably plummets, they aren't on the hook for giant liability. They may behave the same way for any stock that broke circuit breakers that fast, and some of it legit is to protect the interests of their retail investors.

That said, for Robinhood's business model, you're the product, not the investor. Outside of reputational damage they DGAF about the outcomes of individual investors as long as they don't have skin in the game.
the actual link seems to be

https://blog.robinhood.com/news/2021/1/28/keeping-customers-...
No, if they are selling stock, but in the context of short positions, yes, as a margin call.
Last time I've checked, Jamulus is not peer-to-peer but rather server-client and therefore has more latency.
Show HN: Stocksheriff.io Make sure your broker is getting a good price
It’s almost as if different people have very different preferences and companies should provide flexibility to work in whatever way you prefer and are most productive.
Blue checkmarks seem to confirm this:

https://twitter.com/dreamwisp/status/1354865709998723072

edit: My bad, it's "just" cancelling their orders, not selling anything on their behalf.
Same owners at the end of the day.
Please stick to posting substantive comments.
Could you expand on what the risk to Robinhood is here? From what I understand, users purchased stock for money. What is Robinhood holding here that can create risk for them?
How is this related at all to the broker question? Exchanges and brokers are completely different concepts.
> This morning Robinhood conspired with Citadel to halt trading

Do you have evidence that happened, or are you arguing from pure cui bono circumstantiality?
It’s not always easy though to get a good idea of where people currently are on a potentially decades-long multidimensional learning curve. You need a back-and-forth dialog to home in on the right level.
Most of the zero-commission brokerages sell their order flow to market makers. Those companies just decided they didn’t like what the retail investors were doing and stopped accepting buy orders on those stocks.
Raspberry Pi Zero Powers Spotify Streaming iPod
In the words of Agent Kay from MiB "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."
This reminds me of how casinos can kick people out for any reason or no reason at all. Treat meme stocks like a trip to the casino: don't wager more than you can lose.
13G recently filed shows larger holders liquidating -- couple that to the crap financials in GME, then you can see the writing on the wall. However, insiders will be roasted by the DOJ.

Liquidate, restructure, hose commons.

It's GME -- it's a dead company trapped in yesteryear.
> You know who want be fine? The idiot retail investors who actually use robinhood as a broker, lose all their money and can't pay rent because they lost it all gambling on something they didn't understand.

Well, then, I guess we taxpayers should bail them out, the same way we bailed out the banks in 2008.

You might not like it, but at least it would be fair.
Typically when you buy/sell a stock, it's not moving anywhere. Robinhood would try to sell the stock to someone on Robinhood buying the stock first. The big banks and brokerages have enough people buying/selling within its platform that it has enough supply to trade within itself.

For a small brokerage, they would have to work with other brokerages to help them trade, as they wouldn't have enough shares they already hold to trade them within their users. So Robinhood asks Apex for more shares, and Apex has to ask HSBC/Fidelity/JPMC/Goldman if Apex doesn't have any. At some point, all the other institutions also don't want to give up their shares because they need to satisfy demand from their own users. Trading with other firms tends to be really slow too.

It's a short squeeze too, by definition there's not enough stocks available for everyone who wants to buy. So some firms ran out and couldn't get more.